Flexible displays and electronics are poised to revolutionize the industry with low cost, rugged, and/or disposable applications. The proliferation of flexible displays and electronics are inhibited in part by ancillary technologies that facilitate their fabrication. In order for circuitry to be fabricated on flexible substrates, the substrates themselves need to be secured in a fixed orientation during processing. Some have used framing or bonding while others have envisioned roll-to-roll types of processing. While roll-to-roll is promising in theory, the practical application of roll-to-roll to high resolution semiconductor-like processes has yet to be demonstrated on a significant scale. Framing has been demonstrated to be impractical at a large scale, and would require much equipment and process modifications to become a viable option. While bonding technologies exist and are currently implemented at manufacturing scales, these processes have for the most part been limited to rigid-to-rigid bonding.
Another approach is bonding flexible substrates to rigid carriers, involving development of a bonding process with an adhesive amenable to semiconductor processes. This approach renders subsequent debonding even more challenging, since the flexible substrate must be separated from the rigid carrier without damaging the fabricated circuitry or the flexible substrate itself.